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Sunday, October 5, 2014

Book Review: 'Fringe: Sins Of The Father' Just Makes You Miss The Long Gone Series

Fringe is gone, that’s just a hard fact
of life that I’m going to have to accept. Luckily, I’ve had a couple of years
to get used to this, which is more than enough time to marathon the entire
series, a couple of times, just in case you’re wondering. And if you’re also a
fan, it’s good to resign yourself to this, because these
Fringe novelizations—they’re really tie in novels, full of
cursory stories from the lives of the main characters—just aren’t cutting it.

We’re on the third, Fringe: Sins of the
Father, which just came out. The first, The Zodiac
Paradox, follows a young Walter Bishop and William Bell as they romp
through the Bay Area in the late 1960s and match wits with the Zodiac Killer
(not joking). Book two, The Burning Man, follows a young
Olivia and her first experiences with Walter’s drug Cortexiphan. This latest
installment, as you may guess from this pattern, tells of the adventures of
Peter Bishop as he bounces around the globe, pulling scams, and trying to stay
one step ahead of vengeful loan shark Big Eddie. While this is a part of
Peter’s life we don’t have much insight into, and an area of interest, the book
doesn’t have much to recommend it.

This is the Peter before Liv finds him, before he starts
down the path that makes him the good man he ultimately becomes in the series.
And basically he’s just a horrid piece of shit. When you first meet him, he’s
sleeping with prostitutes and attempting to hustle Korean and Chechen gangsters
out of their cash, not caring if they die as a direct result of his actions.
He’s charming, as his character can be, but it’s all in a self-serving,
out-for-number-one way that makes it hard to like him, and that’s a huge
problem. The main thrust of the story has him trying to scam a scientist who he
thinks is trying to cure epilepsy. Of course, there’s more to it, but he
doesn’t know that.

A big part of the fun of Fringe is all
the weirdness, all the strange, otherworldly phenomena and outlier science. So
much of that comes from Walter, and Peter’s association with Olivia and the
FBI, that wasn’t a part of his life before. The issue is, Sins of the
Father tries to shoehorn Fringe events into the story where they
don’t belong and where they don’t make sense in a bigger picture, and he
magically has no recollection of them later, when such things might occur to
him.

We’re not talking about minor events here, either; not
simple little weird things or unusual incidents that could possibly slip your
mind. There a number of memorable, remarkable things that go down, like he
witness crazy ass mutations, sees into other universes, and saves Obama’s life
at a political fundraiser. You might be forgiven for thinking some of these
things might have come up in casual conversation somewhere in the five years
Fringe aired on Fox.

And Peter just doesn’t seem right, as a character. This is a
man who faked credentials and taught at MIT, a guy with a genius level IQ, whip
smart and thorough, but he’s not that person here. You’ve seen him assist
Walter in the lab, competent and holding his own, but there’s a scene here
where he’s helping Dr. Julia Lachaux—who has a forced connection to him and his
father—in a lab, and he’s not exactly lost, but he’s not at the same level as
the person who participates in Walter’s experiments and schemes.

Writing someone that intelligent is no easy feat, and author
Christa Faust, who also penned the previous two books, never quite pulls it
off. He’s intelligent, but not in the way that Peter needs to be. Not to
mention the fact that he’s inconsistent, bouncing wildly from selfish and only
concerned with his own wellbeing, to out of nowhere having a deep regard for
strangers and people he barely knows. You get that Faust is trying to show the
good inside of him, but the way it is approached is haphazard and all over the
place.

The best, most interesting part of Sins of the
Father are the parts that deal with Peter’s youth. Not how he
interacts with Walter—who is also awkwardly inserted into a flashback, and
we’ve seen plenty of his driven, inattentive father bits, so it’s not
particularly engaging—but there are glimpses that show how he gets started down
the path to being a con artist and career criminal. He never fits anywhere,
never belongs, but he learns quickly that he has a talent for getting people to
do what he wants, and you watch that part of him form from an early age. That’s
essentially the main draw of this book, to see his life outside of his work on
Fringe, but it never shows you enough to warrant your
attention.

Aside from that one element, there’s not much to recommend
Sins of the Father, unless you’re a diehard
Fringe fan jonesing hard for a fix. But even then, the
entire series is available to stream on Netflix, and I know you’ve watched it a
bunch of times already, but you’re just not going to find what you’re looking
for here.